2026.03.11 - Maya

The highlight for this release is the new destruction workflow.

ADDED Destruction You can now both create and destroy!
ADDED Light Gizmo A more intuitive way to control light
FIXED Personal Forever Personal licences were limited by the annual upgrade program
FIXED Performance 1000 fps!
FIXED Distance Constraint Offset The offset wasn't properly saved to the .rag file
FIXED Shadow Acne Shadows used to look bad at a distance
FIXED Scale Shape Undo This can now be undone
FIXED Capsule and Mirroring Minor visual glitch in the mirrored render of capsules have been fixed
FIXED Rotate Gizmo Glitch Another minor visual glitch in the rotate gizmo, especially on scaled characters, has been fixed

Overview

A new feature release, Clusters!

Enjoy, and find this new version available here.

Destruction

You can now simulate parts of a mesh as independent rigid bodies, optionally gluing them together with configurable glue strength, via the new rdCluster node.

Meaning you can do this!

How it works

Typically, when you assign a Marker, it will use the mesh for collisions.

If there are "islands" - independently connected chunks of your mesh - then each island gets its own collision "hull", improving the overall accuracy of collisions.

A Cluster on the other hand considers each hull as its own independently moving object.

Mix Markers and Clusters

Clusters and Markers live in the same solver, and interact happily with each other.

Shattering

Ragdoll simulates your shattered pieces but currently does not provide the means to shatter your geometry in the first place. Such as broken glass, broken wood or concrete. This is a topic of its own and many tools already exist.

Until then, here's a short primer on how you can shatter objects the old fashioned way.

Make a plane
Make broad cuts
Make fine cuts
Combine for simulation
Extrude for thickness
Profit

Speedrun

Recording

Typically, Markers are recorded onto the object you assign.

Assigning a cluster follows the same pattern, but instead of recording onto the translate and rotate channels it affects the vertices of the geometry via a typical skinCluster.

And thus, for an object with many pieces, you end up with one joint per piece and worldspace animation.

Post-Recording

Unbind skin and remove joints.

Pose Mode

Feel free to explore pieces and their glue interactively, in Pose Mode. :)

Known Limitations

As of this release, here's what you should expect.

Forces are unsupported
Skinned or animated meshes partly supported
No geometry manipulation tools, e.g. fracturing
Slow for high-poly destruction, e.g. 10,000+ pieces

Light Gizmo

Standalone

Mostly relevant to the upcoming Ragdoll Standalone, but also the Manipulator user interface.

You can now control the light direction by click and dragging on the new Light Gizmo, in Playback Mode.

You can also click and drag in the 3D scene to control where you want shadows to fall!

Personal Forever

The Ragdoll Personal licence is unrestricted by the annual upgrade, you folk may download and use any version of Ragdoll, now and forever. This has now been fixed.

Performance

Everybody likes performance.

Standalone

Mostly relevant to the upcoming Ragdoll Standalone, but also the Manipulator user interface.

Our interface is entirely rendered on the GPU. But traffic between CPU and GPU still needs to happen and is expensive. Recent optimisations means means we can cover the whole pipeline in less than 1 ms!